Television

BBC Governors publish latest complaints findings

MUMBAI: The BBC board of governors have published the findings for their Programme Complaints Committee for the period 1 January to 31 March 2005 and for 1 April to 30 June 2005.

The Governors' Programme Complaints Committee (GPCC) is responsible for monitoring the effectiveness of complaints handling by the BBC, including hearing appeals from complainants who are not happy with the responses they have received from BBC management. The GPCC came to findings on 22 appeals in quarter one: 20 related to matters of impartiality and accuracy and two related to matters of taste and decency. After careful consideration, the Committee upheld two appeals in full or in part.

One complaint that was upheld concerned the show Campbeltown on BBC Two. The complainant was one of nine people to complain to the Programme Complaints Unit about t Campbeltown. The programme was billed as "an intimate portrait of small-town life which follows the lives of four teenagers growing up in Campbeltown, an isolated town on the west coast of Scotland. It has little to offer its young; its old industries are now barely viable, there's no swimming pool and the cinema is shut on a Friday night. These teenagers are faced with trying to find work locally or leaving for a new life elsewhere."

The complainant maintained that the programme was "deliberately dishonest and misleading", and that the programme maker had a "predetermined agenda" to show that "living in a small town is a dead end experience and chose sequences which demonstrated that and omitted sequences which contradicted that viewpoint". The complainant then cited examples of the ways in which the programme had depicted negative elements of the lives of the four teenagers, and omitted positive references.